Corporate news curated our dystopian reality. Funders must support an alternative

In Kansas City, the Kansas City Defender launched a community-driven capital campaign to save Willa’s Books and Vinyl, Missouri's oldest Black-owned bookstore and a critical community landmark in a rapidly gentrifying city. 

In Asheville, JM Pro Community Media solicited donations for a truck with four-wheel drive for their team to provide vital information and resources to residents trapped in their homes in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. 

In New York City, Documented digitally published a Know Your Rights guide that informs immigrants and migrants of what to do if they encounter federal ICE agents on the subway, on the street, or in any other public space. It became one of the platform’s most-read pieces of 2025.

These are just a few examples of a growing network of independent, community-driven newsrooms led by journalists of color. Despite lacking multi-million-dollar operating budgets or invitations to White House dinners like corporate outlets, these newsrooms have become rapid response teams that coordinate and provide tangible resources to residents while delivering the information they need to avoid the mounting dangers of living in the United States. 

Meanwhile, their audiences have seen the pendulum swing for multi-billion-dollar media outlets: In 2020, The Washington Post and NBC were reporting on protests after George Floyd’s murder with at least a bit of historical context, while in 2026, those outlets are delivering talking points for a more authoritarian Trump administration.

Across age groups and the political spectrum, most people understand that national news coverage isn’t a viable way to understand what’s happening in their communities and what their leaders are doing about it. According to Pew Research Center, just over half (56%) of Americans said they trust national news outlets, a number on the decline over the past decade. But though confidence in local news has also declined, Pew also found 70% of the U.S. public still trusts their local outlets’ coverage. This makes community-driven independent media an even more valuable public good in our constantly changing social and political landscape. 

This is why we launched the Racial Equity In Journalism Fund at Borealis Philanthropy in 2019. We recognize the immense talent and passion of media-makers working for social change around how information is shared and who gets it, and we know that with our resources and relationships, the most effective role we can play is to be ecosystem builders. Since 2020 — our first full year of grantmaking — we have redistributed more than $24 million to community newsrooms and movement media organizations because we are dedicated to dreaming up and resourcing a new media landscape that serves communities and breathes life into our decaying social infrastructure. 

In the aftermath of uprisings triggered by the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020, widely publicized diversity statements became part of the corporate media playbook. NBCUniversal News Group set a goal of at least 50% of its staff being people of color. And The Washington Post announced a dozen diversity initiatives, including expanding the About US newsletter, “an authoritative voice on issues of race and identity.” 

Six years on, those media companies have fallen in lockstep with a frighteningly dictatorial government. In one fell swoop, NBC News fired 150 editorial staffers responsible for reporting on Black, Latino, Asian and LGBTQ+ issues. And The Washington Post’s About US initiative is on indefinite hiatus. 

The REJ Fund supports media and news for people who have realized that being a mainstream media company doesn’t inherently make a platform trustworthy, even if it is a national network news, cable, or legacy print outlet. More and more, audiences are recognizing these outlets’ institutional interpretation of objectivity usually means reporting from an increasingly privileged point of view — one that doesn’t account for the challenges that communities of color, rural communities, trans people, disabled people, and other marginalized folks are enduring. 

In 2023, REJ grantee and Kansas City Defender founder and executive editor Ryan Sorrell told us that a significant part of the outlet’s mission is narrative repair that corrects the stories advanced by mainstream news organizations.

“These outlets often engage in practices such as copaganda, presenting one-sided narratives that feed into systemic violence and racist dehumanization,” he said. “We utilize our platform to dispel these destructive narratives and ensure our community is portrayed accurately and respectfully.”

Copaganda is an example of the kind of narrative malfeasance committed by mainstream outlets to obscure the powerful people responsible for our suffering. Briefly, it’s the practice of hero worship in coverage of police, defaulting to a pro-police point of view in news, or even just leaving out voices of those affected by police presence. It’s part of why more Americans are turning to social media and online forums to get trusted news and information as audiences for traditional media shrink.

Since 2020, people across the country have seen food, housing, and gas prices outpace their household budgets, survived catastrophic weather events driven by the climate crisis, and been stalked, detained, and even killed by federal agents. In an ideal world, the news would help us make sense of this chaos and maybe even give us clues on how to stop it or, at the very least, navigate it. This is the very necessary function of the press in a healthy democracy.

Newsrooms with money and power to make a tangible impact on public discourse and public policy — like the New York Times, which is worth $10 billion, or Los Angeles Times, which courted private investors last year to raise up to $500 million — should be mobilizing their vast resources to speak to and with communities, connecting voices on the ground to decision-makers at the top. They should be committed to using their influence and money to caring about and for communities of color in specific ways, like funding investigative reporting fellowships or running a matching contribution campaign to benefit community media. 

They know how to do this already. But without support commensurate with the social and political crises we are facing, they will help curate our dystopian reality instead of transforming it.

But another, more hopeful pattern has also emerged in the past six years. In contrast to media giants, community newsrooms continue to chug along, even as the Trump administration threatens their nonprofit status, philanthropic funders eager to comply in advance with an authoritarian government cut their budgets, and their audiences' informational needs keep growing. 

Any philanthropic funder serious about turning our current situation around has to invest as much as possible in community media infrastructure. Nothing else will change without it. The political right knows this, which is why conservative billionaires are investing in major media corporations. Meanwhile, progressive funders paint nonprofit newsrooms’ reliance on foundation funding as a problem.

In a summer fundraising appeal to readers titled “Fascism has its boots on Prism’s neck,” Prism’s editor-in-chief Lara Witt explained how the outlet’s BIPOC-led reporting on justice has incurred funder withdrawals. 

“We have lost half a million dollars in philanthropic support, and we have almost no secure funding for next year,” Witt said. ”I cannot swallow these harms against us and our communities and remain quiet … We are not going to remain silent as our support systems abandon us to protect themselves.”

Prism doubling down on its mission, despite lost funding, shows how independent, community-centered newsrooms have operationalized the knowledge that you can’t have a newsroom audience if the audience members aren’t at least alive.

This is perhaps the most moving argument for shifting our clicks, our subscriptions, and our eyeballs to community media sources that exemplify what journalism should look like in times of both peace and crisis. But community support is just the start. 

For anyone who says this investment is not possible, the REJ Fund has already crunched the numbers. To bring culturally and geographically specific news coverage and information to more households — that is, to reverse the damage that media consolidation and capture have wrought since 2020 — we need a minimum investment of $382 million in community-run newsrooms. Compared to the $40 billion in media-supporting grants already gifted by philanthropy, this is pennies. 

What we’ve found is that supporting smaller newsrooms earlier on — particularly those with an annual budget of $300,000 or less — has an outsized impact on their growth trajectory and their ability to serve their audiences. As funders, we often talk about ceding power to grantee partners; one impactful way to do this is to offer smaller, strategic infusions of cash during critical moments that a program cycle can’t foresee, like a change in leadership, emergencies wrought by sociopolitical changes. These and other lessons are informing our roadmap to a healthier, more diverse, more caring media ecosystem.

Our new report, released Nov. 3, Beyond the Grant: Rebuilding the Economics of Multiracial News Media, is a capstone of what we’ve learned from our first five years of grantmaking to independent newsrooms rooted in and serving communities of color, including which strategies have worked well for our grantee partners, where they need the most support from funders, and how philanthropy can work together collectively with newsrooms to help build a new, more liberatory media landscape for all. 

Editor’s note: The Objective is a current grantee of Borealis Philanthropy’s Racial Equity in Journalism Fund.

Alicia Bell (they/she) is a strategist, community organizer, parent, caretaker, and weaver currently serving as the Director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. 

Brittaney Carter (she/her) is a writer and nonprofit communications consultant currently serving as the External Visibility Strategist for the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund.

This piece was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Marlee Baldridge.